The intellectual heart of UC Berkeley, the College of Letters and Science (L&S) is the largest of the university’s 14 colleges and schools and the most prestigious teaching and research unit in the UC system.

The L&S Office of Undergraduate Advising, with a staff of highly skilled and experienced college advisers, is here to help you make the best choices for your academic career and get the most out of your time at Berkeley.

The College of Letters & Science stands at the heart of Berkeley’s intellectual preeminence and comprehensive excellence. Our continued leadership in education, research, and public service depends on private philanthropy.

February 12, 2018

February is Black History Month. To honor the month, every Monday we’ll hear from a different African American leader on campus. Today, we’re talking with graduate student Kenly Brown, who sees mentorship as an essential part of what it means to be a leader.

February 8, 2018

Being able to remain calm in a crisis, says Luis Mora, a third-year political science major at UC Berkeley, is what helped him get through nearly three weeks of detention by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He was released Jan. 17 with the help of Berkeley’s Undocumented Student Program and an outpouring of support from campus advocacy groups and top state leaders.

UC Berkeley’s newest residence hall will be named after David Blackwell, the first black professor to ever receive tenure at UC Berkeley and a preeminent statistician, Chancellor Carol Christ announced on Thursday.

February 6, 2018

Three Ph.D. candidates in the College of Letters & Science (Jason Wang, Marta Bryan, and Sivan Ginzburg) have received "Pegasi b" fellowships that will enable them to study extrasolar planets and exoplanets. Read more...

January 26, 2018

The lone male voice on a distinguished panel on gender, power and sexual harassment, UC Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner this week offered research insights into male sexual aggression and the backlash that has sparked the #MeToo movement.

January 25, 2018

From a pilot housing project and new internship and career opportunities to a summer transition program and personalized help applying for admission, the campus is stepping up its efforts to help transfer students make a smoother transition to UC Berkeley from community college.

January 24, 2018

The author of the recently published More than Meets the Eye: What Blindness Brings to Art and a consultant to institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Tate Modern, Professor Georgina Kleege has been on many touch tours of museums. She wants to go beyond that.

January 19, 2018

The College of Letters and Science Office of Undergraduate Advising will be temporarily suspending the CalCentral appointment-scheduling tool. We will provide drop-in advising and pre-scheduled appointments beginning Monday, October 2, 2017.

January 17, 2018

Jennifer Doudna, a professor of molecular and cell biology and of chemistry, received the 2018 NAS Award in Chemical Sciences for “pioneering discoveries on how RNA can fold to function in complex ways” and the invention, with Emmanuelle Charpentier, of the CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technology.

Margaret Conkey, a UC Berkeley professor emerita of anthropology known for her pioneering exploration of feminist perspectives and gender issues in archaeology as well as new interpretations of European cave paintings from the Paleolithic era, is the Royal Anthropological Institute’s 2017 Thomas J. Huxley Memorial Medal recipient.

Third-year L&S Physics graduate student Vetri Velan and nuclear engineering graduate student Kathy Shields were honored by Representative Barbara Lee for their national effort to defeat the recent tax proposal that would have forced graduate students to pay taxes on the value of their education.

January 16, 2018

In selecting “The Work of the Dead,” a book by UC Berkeley history professor Thomas W. Laqueur, to receive the 2018 Shannon Prize in Contemporary European Studies, the jury praised its examination of how and why the living have cared for the dead in western Europe since the 18th century as a monumental achievement.

The 2012 eruption of the Havre volcano took place three-quarters of a mile under the surface, on the ocean floor 600 miles north northeast of the North Island of New Zealand, and offered researchers a rare opportunity to study submarine eruptions. Michael Manga, a UC Berkeley professor of earth and planetary sciences, is a co-author of a paper about the aftermath of the eruption published online today in the journal Science Advances.

In Alice Wu's honors thesis, written when she was a UC Berkeley undergraduate, she found and detailed rampant gender stereotyping and misogyny on the popular and anonymous online Economics Jobs Market Rumors (EJMR) forum. Last Friday, she appeared on an all-female panel at the American Economic Associaton's conference that publicly examined gender issues in economics.